Month: April 2014

I’ve always liked Virtual PC, and it was a shame IMHO when Microsoft twisted this fantastic utility in some glorified IE6 box, A’la “Windows XP Mode” for Windows 7.

So I downloaded and installed VMWare Player, as I’ve heard you can use it to run ESX among other things requiring hardware acceleration, and player fits the bill for being cheap.

Passing the hardware acceleration to a child VM is a matter of checking a single box in the settings. Namely the ‘Virtualize Intel VT-x/EPT or AMD-V/RVI” box. Although you don’t have to click it if you want, it just offers greater performance.

VMWare Player

Now I installed my old copy of XP x64, as I felt like something different, then I went ahead and installed Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 sp1. The installation was pretty uneventful.

Now with that out of the way, I could setup a VM,and I decided to install OS/2 1.21 for the heck of it.

Virtual PC running OS/2 1.21 without hardware acceleration

And it booted up no problems, like it did back in the XP days. I even ran it with and without CPU acceleration and it works on both, but is noticeably faster with acceleration.

With Intel-VT acceleration

So I thought this was interesting, although Virtual PC has been essentially dead ended, it can go on with an older OS in a VM, to let you run VMs.

I would imagine that if VMWare Player could run Virtual PC 2007, that 2004 should work as well.

I’ve never heard of Chex Quest. I guess because at the time, 1996 I wasn’t that big on kids cereal. But as it turns out, Digital Café had been selected by WatersMolitor, care of Ralston Foods to create something for this new fangled digital age to get kids to eat Chex.

So yeah, it’s Ultimate DOOM, done as a total conversion. All licensed from iD in the days before Quake.

Unlike DOOM, and it’s feel for ultra-violence, you just zap green slime things back to their home dimension while you try to free your Chex people things. I guess this shouldn’t be surprising, remember there is that horrid ‘Super 3d Noah’s Ark‘ thing that is built around Wolfenstein 3D.

And it was a few more years (1999) until we had to deal with Columbine, and how violent video games make people kill (just like loud music, role playing games, books, and other things before that).

But sadly I had a lowly 4MB 386sx-16 with CGA, so things like this game with it’s awesome VGA graphics were an impossibility.

Even more sad at the time was that ‘primitive’ 3d games like wolfenstein 3d also required VGA.

But as we all know a few short months later, DOOM was released, and then Terminator Rampage was quickly swept off the face of the earth.

I recently came across this page, and I thought I’d give it a shot. The requirements are pretty ‘minimal’:

Minimal 386DX-25 with 4MB of Ram, VGA & 18MB of disk space

Recommended 386DX-33 or 486DX-33

So I was thinking Qemu could easily run this game. Long story short, it doesn’t work. Turns out Rampage needs EMS. And for whatever reasons, running emm386.exe on Qemu (I tried a handful of versions) just crash on Qemu after initialization. Failing with stock Microsoft EMM386, I tried JEMM, which loaded, and ran it’s built in EMS diagnostics OK, but trying to run Rampage resulted in a nice crash.

Qemu crash

So giving up on Qemu, I tried it on DOSBox. It runs but it is incredibly jerky. So I thought I’d try PCem, and see how it runs there.

So the plus side is that PCem, is able to run MS-DOS & EMM386.EXE without issues. It only took a few minutes to install MS-DOS 5.0 and Rampage on my ‘virtual’ 486DX2/66 with 8MB, of ram, and load up Rampage to be greeted with it’s jerky motion.

Thinking its something with emulation in general I fire up Norton SI to get some PCem scores how it benches against known good samples.

386DX-33Mhz 37.4486DX/2-66Mhz 136.8WinChip-90 186

Then comparing the scores to this handy (if not ancient) Norton Si benchmark spread we see:

Well now that interesting, so at a ‘raw’ CPU level, PCem is delivering on what would be classical performance. So for the heck of it, I load up DOOM, and it runs a bit choppy on the 386, but flies on the 486 & Winchip emulation. Now that is strange. And just to confirm…

Terminator Rampage Box (back)

They really thought this would be playable on a 486 @ 33Mhz.

So how does it choke? While going straight is ‘ok’ turning around is so utterly sluggish that there is no feeling of immersion. It feels like you are driving an incredibly slow tank. At the same time, the more realistic sprites, and textures serve to make it look even more unrealistic.

So what am I talking about?

Well here is a screenshot of Wolfenstein 3d on the 386DX-33 (and more than playable).

Wolfenstein 3d

As you can see, there is no ceiling, and no floor textures. The walls are all uniform height, and the textures were clearly drawn by hand, giving it a very fake and ’16bit’ feeling. I should also add on a capable 286, this game is playable.

Terminator Rampage

Now at first it looks like it has a lot in common with the soon to be release DOOM, with textured ceilings and floors.

Doom

Now as you can see the difference in DOOM is the 2.5D effect of there being lower areas so you can go up and down stairs (while you cannot go under them). Also Doom introduces dynamic lighting, and better sound rendering.

While I do like Rampage’s upfront map, as you can see thought, it is very square. In a small effort to ‘speed’ up Rampage you can turn off the ceilings and floors revealing a very Wolf3d like environment. Unfortunately the more they tried to give the world detail, the more it well just looks flat.

No ceilings, No floors.

Which kind of kills the whole thing. Maybe they should have left out things like water fountains.

High detail sprites

Then you get things like this computer setup (one of the programmers? The accountant’s lamp is a nice touch) but it’s a sprite, so as you rotate around it, you always see the same face.

Ironically it’s these high resolution background sprites that make the environment feel less real, as they make the rooms feel too open, and too sparse.

Too open, and yet too sparse

It is the real paradox that in a good shooter you have lots of room, and things to duck behind, but the rooms feel too large, and look bizarre with the massive open spaces. But it is more so a limitation of the time, with the engine being more of an improved Wolf3d engine, than taking a larger leap into being something more 2.5d or 3d like Doom (or the distant Quake).

Another thing that really bugged me was the doors.

Doom door

In doom, the doors felt more ‘natural’ in that they weren’t super wide.

Generic office door in Rampage

But in rampage they are stretched wide giving the impression of why you can’t turn is you are incredibly wide..

Rampage ‘exit’ door

Even the ‘exit’ door texture still feels too wide.

I could probably get by the empty spaces, but it takes so long to turn around, and the controls feel so unnatural (they don’t even try to be a Wolf3d control-a-like) that it really feels klunky. No matter what speed you play it at.

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* Initial support for KVM on AArch64 systems (some features such as migration are not yet implemented)
* Support for all 64-bit mode ARMV8 user-accessible instructions except for the optional CRC and crypto extensions
* Support for new 32-bit mode ARMv8 instructions in TCG
* Support for the allwinner-a10-based board “-M cubieboard”
* Support for POWER Altivec 2.07 and VSX instructions when running under TCG
* Support for boot order in pSeries emulation
* The Q35 x86 machine-type now supports CPU hotplug.
* On the PIIX x86 machine-type, PCI hotplug now supports devices behind a bridge (for bridges not added by hotplug; hot-plugged bridges can still use the PCI Standard Hot-Plug Controller)
* Support for the Hyper-V reference time counter via the “hv-time” suboption of “-cpu”. This can improve performance of Windows guests substantially for applications that do many floating-point or SIMD operations. (Requires KVM and Linux 3.14).
* ACPI tables generated by QEMU can now be used by OVMF (https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UEFI/OVMF) firmware. OVMF starting with SVN r15420 is needed. In particular hotplug, pvpanic device and other ACPI based features now work for OVMF
* PCI passthrough of devices with a ROM now work on Xen
* support for suspend-to-RAM in the XHCI USB controller
* GTK UI is now supported on Windows hosts
* New management interfaces for CPU and virtio-rng hotplug
* Improved reliability for live migration when using qcow2 images
* Live snapshot merging
* Experimental support in virtio-blk for M:N threading model: if you specify x-dataplane=on, you can also create I/O threads with “-object iothread” and point virtio-blk devices to the desired iothread with the “x-iothread” property. Properties of the running iothreads can be queried with the QMP command “query-iothreads”.
* Network block drivers (curl, iscsi, rbd, ssh, glusterfs) can be built as shared library modules with “–enable-modules” configure option.
* QEMU is now able to operate even if the underlying storage requires the buffer size to be a 4K multiple. This is the case for 4K-native disks (with cache=none or when accessed through iscsi:// URLs) and some raw devices
* QEMU can access NFSv3 shares directly from userspace using libnfs.
* Improvements to the TCG optimizer make it produce faster code
* Tracing QEMU via LTTng 2.x is now supported
* And lots more…

So yeah, I’m still without my “dedicated” server, and now even fragready’s portal is broken. I just want to get on the box, and do a secure wipe myself.

So at least I have this super discount VM in Germany to keep my blog running. Before I was hosting Exchange on KVM in the dedicated server. However now I’m going to pull all my crap back home, as I setup an OpenVPN connection from my home to the VPS, and from there got some static routing working well enough that I can host an Exchange server at home, and use postfix to store & forward. A pretty simple & standard setup.